Throughout my career, I’ve worked primarily in office environments. After around 20 years of this kind of professional lifestyle, it’s safe to say that I’ve been inside of them to know that if you’ve worked in one, you’ve kind of worked in all of them. Otherwise, shows like The Office or movies like Office Space don’t exist, because anyone’s who’s ever been in office life can immediately relate.
One of the more fascinating sociological observations there are in an office environment is the introduction of communal food; namely the inevitable leftovers that typically occur, because in most cases, office environments almost always end up with more food than there are people capable of eating it all. Typically, in most places I’ve been, leftovers are often times placed in a break room or somewhere publicly communal, and then some admin sends a wide-reaching mass email to notify everyone that there’s free food leftover. Cue the chargers.
My current workplace is no exception to this practice. If anyone on my floor has any sort of catering, the leftovers are often put in the breakroom and the floor admin emails the whole floor to let all teams know that there’s free food available, and then the same people stampede en masse to pick at the remains, and even worse, there are some who simply just collect and hoard, effectively denying those who might actually want to eat immediately.
The thing is, my current workplace is a gargantuan office campus, so there are tons of floors potentially doing the same thing on any given day. It’s gotten to the point where there’s a Slack channel dedicated to people all sharing information on where there are leftovers somewhere on the campus, prompting people to be going to some odd and unrelated to their jobs corners of the property in order to get some free leftovers.
But among these level-5 scavengers are the aforementioned hoarders who don’t just go hunting for leftovers, but like they do on their own floor, go to hoard and save them, for later consumption. It’s these particular people that serve as the impetus to this post, because as I’m sure everyone’s seen the office scavengers in their own respective offices, I have to wonder how many people have come across such office hoarders, who go around hunting for leftovers not just for instant gratification, but for preparation for future meals on a larger scale.
Case in point, these particular individuals go as far as to have a stockpile of Tupperware, saran wraps and aluminum foil in their desks, with the intent of hoarding leftover food from around the campus.